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Winter Moons by Dana Wilde "The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun" - Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man" Here in Maine, winter is long and cold. In the past it was even longer and colder, or so memory and certain old people suggest. One of Thoreau's journal entries from before 1850 notes without surprise a fairly heavy snowfall in mid-April. That was in Massachusetts, which is still part of the temperate east. Farther north and east, beyond New Hampshire, the Saco River in southern Maine is the accepted anthropological divisor of the Eastern Woodlands region from the Eastern Subarctic region. "Subarctic" refers to a length and depth of winter freeze which is something less than polar. The limits of a subarctic winter might accurately be described as the months when snow can reasonably be expected to bury everything. And in earlier times, the months when food became scarce to nonexistent. Most of Maine drowses through winter from November to April. By late January the cold has normally been so long and so thorough that it's difficult even to stay awake. The ice grinds everything to a halt, or so close to a halt that for all intents and purposes nothing happens. The roads are frozen, and so are your bones. Snow piles up everywhere, obliterating the driveway and the baseball diamond. In fields the only signs that anything ever lived are dead spokes of grass or a few uncut corn stalks, the occasional raccoon, fox or deer tracks in the snow. You don't want to go outside. You want to stay in where the heat is, smell the wood smoke or the dry, nylon odor of electric coils. The inner staleness of the kitchen, unventilated since October. A house is a core of warmth, like a burrow. It seems unutterably small after a while, but at least it's not frozen. In the cold we describe even the warm by what it's not. Cold is the absence of heat. Ice is that pervasive presence in the universe which signifies what is not. Sometimes on really arctic nights the ice - or maybe not the ice itself but its stillness and hardness - becomes fascinating, and I feel sucked outside to see the emptiness. Away from the artificial fires of western culture, which throw smoke and black soot all over chunky roadside snowbanks, the snow in the woods remains purely white, even during its porous melting period in March. The whiteness is a blankness, even more complete than on the ocean surface because it does not move. Billions of tiny frozen water crystals, motionless, piling up around the hemlocks and in the arms of pines, bluish in moon shadows. Everything suspended, waiting for the Sun to come up. Especially at night. The air is emptied of moisture, and to breathe is to suck in pure cold, like blocks of ice tumbling into your lungs. In arctic cold, -10, -20 F and colder, a deep breath extinguishes the vascular heat in your chest, and a sharp pain creases your sternum. You breathe slowly to preserve the inner reserves of warmth. I saw the emptiness completely one moonless January midnight when I walked across the pond to look at Orion. The camp road was slick with crushed powdery |
snow over a slab of ice. The stars were thick, like magnified crystals in the blackness. On the pond my boots blasted oblong impact pits into the glazed snow. I thought the pond must be frozen completely through to the bottom. |
Everything seemed impregnable, as if the cold itself was insulation. In the first stages of freezing there is nervousness. When the chill penetrates your skin, you have a natural inclination to move, which for most people means shivering. As the cold filters further into your bones your body becomes calmer, and drowsiness takes over. A desire to succumb sets in, like a cat settling into a chair, and a fascination for sleep dulls the desire to survive. In its final phase, I imagine, it solidifies into a need to relinquish consciousness completely and become ice. Standing on the pond, binoculars in glove, I kept shivering. The emptiness yawned all around me. Flat, dark ice reposed like a moonscape, sometimes buckling and creaking as if the Earth itself could shiver. In a rough circle around the pond's edges loomed pointed giants, spruces and pines. |
It was like standing in a still crater. Rim mountains spoked up all around me. The impact basin was flat, pocked with tiny holes. The arctic cold of the Earth, I thought, is the same as the Moon's, or Triton's, or Charon's. Absence is absence. Nothing is nothing. You can die of sleep as easily here as there. For a few minutes I relaxed. Stars plainly rising over a crater-rim scintillated on the edge of the absence, like the fat dreams that come before deep sleep. I was on a moon somewhere, becoming ice. Without closing my eyes I passed for seconds or an hour outside the normal orbit of human perception, under the snow-encrusted surface of the pond to the stillest, blankest observable territory in these parts. I slid across an empty, godforsaken whiteness and fortunately for my soul, recognized Europa circling Jupiter half a billion miles away. A place of uncontrollable cold, smooth beyond comprehension because it's wrapped in a frozen ocean, solid ice 50 miles or more straight down. Underneath is more water, not yet frozen, resting on dense, cold rock. For Next page |
Europa rising. NASA photo |
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